He left before dark, Bonny said.
What do you want me to do about it? Sal said.
He is lost in the snow. I’m sure he’s been robbed. Beaten. I called the bank and there is no answer.
No shit. Banks closed hours ago. Bonny, it’s simple. He went home, Sal said.
He is not home, Bonny shouted, eliciting some noises from the audience. He directed himself to the dark mass below. I will pay you. Just one hour of your time. I will pay each of you to search for my boy. Help me find my boy, and then you can return to your movie.
Shhhh! went a chorus of voices.
Money, said the man in front of John. Always money.
John, in the second row from the back, had turned around to look up at the voices on the mezzanine.
Bonny tried again. Only an hour and I will pay and feed you all!
No one responded this time. Standard determination: engaging with a nut only encourages him.
Christ almighty, you keep it down or I’ll throw you bodily out of here, Sal said.
Bonny then committed an act of sacrilege. On the wall just to the side of where they stood were the rockers that controlled the library lights, and he reached out and mashed his hand against them. Ten banks of fluorescent tubing flickered on above the audience, who en masse turned around in their chairs to squint up at the perpetrator of this inhumane act. They were a motley bunch, patchy goatees and comb-overs, brown and orange sweaters straining at the gut, clutching smoldering cigarettes and potato chip bags, their eyebrows working against the sudden onslaught of light, the overall effect not unlike that of a squad of cockroaches caught on midnight patrol out in the expanse of the kitchen floor, their antennae dipping this way and that, reeling at the shock of exposure.
I will pay you! Good money! He is just a boy. You must have some compassion in your hearts? He is only thirteen years old!
But Bonny must have seen that he was pleading with the mewling faces of a nursery, fat cheeks and drooling mouths, black eyes open wide but unseeing. He was at that moment as alone as he’d ever been in his adopted country, an alien among aliens, searingly afraid that his boy, born and raised here, was well on his way to becoming one of these bloated, weak American creatures, which was exactly why he was lost in the snow, having fallen prey to one of the gangs that roamed Riverside Park.
Sal reached for the lights, but Bonny caught his wrist. I beg you.
You’re about to lose that hand, Sal said, trying to wrench his arm free, but Bonny’s unwavering strength suggested a different outcome. You call the police? Sal said.
The police? The police do nothing, Bonny said. Call the police? Am I mad?
Your, ah, what, community, then?
What community? You are my community! Bonny yelled.
Sal was at his wit’s end. You check the hospitals? he said, and, finally released, cut the lights.
Pardon me? Bonny said.
If the hospital’s no good, you check the morgue. If he’s not home and he’s not here and he’s not at the hospital—
Bonny stared through the dark into Sal’s face, unbelieving.
I’ve got paying customers here.
My son!
This is my place of business. This my place of business! My business is to show film, not run search parties.
Twenty dollars a man! Bonny said.
Not for sale! shouted the Marxist in front of John.
Sal put his hands on Bonny’s shoulders and began to turn him toward the stairs.
You know my son. He’s a good boy. A paying customer, Bonny said.
I can’t do anything for you.
John almost offered his help. How different things might have been if only he had. But he reconsidered. As far as he could make out, the boy had seized the opportunity to escape, however briefly, the watchful eye of his loving jailer.
Sal marched him down the mezzanine stairs, across the back of the library, and out through the blackout curtain. Bonny’s voice beseeched the audience from outside, rising over the soundtrack: You have children of your own, do you not? Are you not the fathers of children? And if your children went missing in the night? In a storm like this? Would you not do everything in your power to save them? Would you not?
There was not one man in the audience who had a child. Not one.
John went back to the movie and his pipe, the soundtrack rising and falling. His attention drifted, then snapped back to the whirring spin of professional eavesdropper Hackman rewinding a tape of the fateful conversation, the recording revealing its layers as Hackman carefully adjusted the levels on his machines, drum noise lifting away like balloons, exposing the central line of dialogue, He’d kill us if he got the chance. Right, right. Stupid premise. John’s mind returned to Bonny, and the more he thought about the man’s hysterics, the more he disliked him. Yet as he thought about the exchange and his own reaction, he began to worry that it had not been his reaction at all, but his father’s reaction. It was his father who would hate another man for committing the sin of vulnerability. His father had no use for a person who couldn’t protect his own and looked to other men to solve his problems. These were the men his father had served every day of his professional life. Wealthy, vulnerable men, heads of corporations, unable to fend for themselves when they found themselves caught in the vise of the legal system. He hated them all.
John stayed until the
